Posts by Reboot_IT

Valve's Half-Life

Classic - yet still no movie!

Wasn't District 9 meant to be based loosely on HL? The only related thinkg I could see in the movie was the gravity gun and the prawns.

Microsoft fast-tracks Windows 8 Service Pack updates

"that stops the soft keyboard doing an effective ctrl lock, or at least a way of turning it off once it bizarrely gets there."

Tap the Ctrl key like mad... That usually stops it :-)

Won't read that in an MS KB.

Santander's banking website craps out

What will be...

... the new upgrade then...

Bank Trojan crooks trouser £800k from 30,000 Brits

On-line banking = Secure

End-user computer = Not Secure (full of Malware, Trojans, Keyloggers, [insert more crap here]

Office 365: This cloud isn't going to put any admins out of a job

Re: My experience

"Guess the monthly cost of my employers setup with 50+ staff, 400 students? "

I presume you don't take a wage and do it all for free then?

I support an office of 30 users and contract about 20 hours per-month.

They are traders and most of the operations are hosted off-site. Everything is managed well and they hardly have any problems.

That's what I would call cost saving... Rather than having a full-time IT bod on £40,000-a-year.

Guess what I would suggest for your company?...

Story withdrawn

How to remove viruses...

Remove any exitsing scanners (PC CrappySpyWare, McArsey, Nortbomb, etc)

... Run Hitman pro.. clean.. reboot

Run full Malwarebytes scan.. clean.. reboot

Run Eset on-line scanner.. clean ..reboot

Still infected? Run Combofix.. reboot.

HijackThis.. Have a butchers yourself...

Nuke from orbit.. It's the only way to be sure.

Get the picture? Not one AV detects all infections..

Crap gone?

10. Windows Update

20. reboot

30. Goto 10 until important updates = 0

You'll laugh, but I run AVG free as my real-time scanner as it seems to use sod all resources and is fairly good at detecting real-time crap slinging!

Microsoft guns for web sales biz in piracy crackdown

Mr X

"Mr X's Hard disk is gone, he wasnt offered/didnt make revoery disks - Thats a new copy of windows please despite your key being intact

Mr X's Key is faded (look at the bottom of your laptop) and needs a re-install. Manufacturer blames MS but thats a new copy of windows needed to (unless its Tosh or Sony who play nice)

Mr X's PC just needs reinstalling but the media is scratched or missing - again, new copy needed"

=======================================

Mr X should then re-order his OEM installations disks from the PC manufacturer. For about £40... and it's legal.

Office 365 in the real world

P.S

Should of said £4 per-user per-month!!

Implementation

Our implementations of 365 have gone pretty well.

Yes you do need a minimum of Office 2007 (2008???) to get the full exchange 'experience'.

It all boils down to who you have to implement it, it's early days for the Microsoft Cloud so I guess the cowboys are on the band wagon.

But a 25gb mailbox for small businesses at £4 per-month is good, considering all the headaches and continuous support that is required for an in-house Exchange server.

If you are considering moving to 365, you need to make sure you find a team who know what they are doing.

Afterall this is just a cloud (exchange) e-mail migration which other providers have been doing for a long time but more expensive!

Microsoft de-cloaks Windows 8 push-button lifesaver

"Most end users don't RTFM..."

And that bit overwrite will (from my understanding) be ever so helpful when you go to recover the data after an accidental "reset".

At least now you can recover the users data when they tried to fix themselves by accidentally choosing "factory restore", with bog standard off-the-shelf data recovery software.

What's the chances of data recovery after one of these resets? Anyone?

Comet 'sold 94,000 pirate Windows CDs', claims Microsoft

In a fair World...

... the recovery disk would be downloadable under the support section of the manufacturers website as an ISO.

There is no reason not to do this anymore, people have fast enough download speeds.

It's all a con, and as someone said above OFT should really be looking into this.

I don't think ANY amount of signage is going to get the customer to burn/keep their recovery disks.

I'm suspecting this is going to be a major issue in the next few months with all the hard drive failures due to post-flood production in Thailand!

Malware endemic even on protected PCs

Almost all...

... laptops and desktops that we get from our clients have some kind of infection on them.

We repair between 30-50 Windows machines a week too.

The worst offenders usually have the "paid for" AV protection which kindly refuses to update its definitions when the subscription has run out. Most people can't be @$$'d to renew.

Germany warns surfers against Firefox

Virus attack

I rescue about 7-8 laptops/desktops per-week from "Vista antivirus pro" and the like malware.

I’d say browser-wise it is 50/50 Firefox and IE.

I don't think you have a chance in hell of educating all users on how to protect themselves, and to be honest it isn't their fault. Criminal gangs have infected Google SERPS, causing a confusing pop-up when you visit supposedly legit sites. I have personally noticed that they are using PPC and natural listings to accomplish this.

I would put the blame on Google and the anti-virus vendors for this type of variant. I reckon they should be working closer (not giving up the algorithm of cause!), and can only see the situation getting worse as more jump on the bandwagon.

P.S You don't need to reinstall, it is possible to remove this crap with free tools from the web, and at £50 a pop. Business is good.